The Alok Vihar Complex at Ghorabandha where the telephone exchange will come up. Picture by Srinivas

Jamshedpur, July 29: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) will soon set up a new telephone exchange at Ghorabandha close to Telco township.

The step, especially at a time when the number of BSNL landline subscribers has dwindled from 1 lakh to 80,000, is being attributed to the increasing demand of Internet facility through broadband.

General manager of BSNL Jamshedpur telecom district A.K. Pahi said the exchange would have a capacity of 1,000 lines since the area adjacent to Telco township, towards Ghorabandha and Lohabasa, had flourished considerably.

“We were not laying cables for connections as we had a shortage of landline switches necessary for setting up a new exchange. But we will have to find a solution,” Pahi said.

“We will reorganise the existing telephone exchanges here and take out the landline switches lying idle to set up the new exchange,” he said. There are 90 telephone exchanges under the Jamshedpur secondary switching area.

“We had been pressing the BSNL authorities for providing us a connection, but despite repeated requests, the authorities concerned have done nothing,” Sachin Tiwary, a resident of Vivek Vihar in Ghorabandha.

Tiwary said that over a dozen apartment buildings have come up in Ghorabandha and the area would be developed further as it was a flood-free zone.